Wish List - Wish List: Wish #19

I understand currently nanohub does not support download of 3d data files by online users but sometimes being able to download the 3d data is useful since this data can be manipulated in the users’ favorite plot viewer. Another use might be for comparing results from nanohub simulator to those from other simulator which the user is more familiar with.

Comments (5)

I have heard several people telling me that they would like to get the raw data for 3d data sets.
We can by default at least export the dx data that we use internally. That should not be weeks of development time.

I think we can offer this in the form of VTK files for 3D mesh/field outputs. In fact, we already offer this as a download format for the viewer widgets based on the VTK visualization server (e.g. contour plots and streamline plots). We are also close to using VTK exclusively in the nanovis based viewer widgets (the deprecated DX format will be converted to VTK). So we will be able to offer VTK download there as well (from the volume and particle flow viewers). VTK is a much more prevalent format than DX and can serve as a good starting point for those who wish to do visualization offline, as it can be read by ParaView, VisIt and 3D Slicer, to name a few examples. When molecules are included in outputs, we should be able to offer them as PDB. If that sounds like an workable plan, I can accept this and keep it updated.

This sounds good in principle.
There used to be a 3D renderer that can handle 1Million+ atoms explicitly in nanoVIS. I just asked ravis to try to use that one, since we need it for quantum dot lab.
Will this be maintained?
Gerhard

In response to Gerhard’s comment: I think this wish is concerning download of 3d data files, and that is what my proposal aims to implement. The intention is to give users the ability to get data in a standard format that can be used in offline viewing software as a fallback when the hub render servers are missing features or the ability to handle large data: in that case a local graphics workstation will always have the edge in performance over the hub environment. That being said, we can look at adding rendering features to the hub render servers such as for large point clouds, but I think it would be better to discuss those features as separate wishes.

As of Rappture 1.3.11, 3D data from field and drawing outputs may be downloaded as VTK files. This was already available for the vtkvis-based viewers in previous releases, but this release adds support for downloading from the nanovis-based viewers as well.